Olivia Rodrigo review – crushing riffs and infectious hooks at secret New York show
At 10am on Thursday, Olivia Rodrigo announced in an Instagram post that she would play a concert in Brooklyn later that night. Tickets went on sale at precisely the same moment – for the princely sum of $25 a pop – not through a Ticketmaster presale code or a virtual waiting room or one of the other digital gauntlets numbingly familiar to today’s concertgoer but in-person only from the box office at Warsaw, the century-old Polish community hall turned music venue in Greenpoint.
That made admission less a transaction than a delicate equation of geography, endurance and luck. Fans who lived in the neighborhood or happened to be nearby made a beeline to Driggs Avenue where the growing queue – including many “remote workers” cradling slightly ajar MacBooks – curled around the block as the heat index reached toward 100F. People arriving around 11.20am were already being turned away. By 11.40am, the roughly 1,000 wristbands had all been snapped up. Hours later, those fortunate few punters found themselves improbably close to one of the biggest pop stars on the planet. Maybe 90% of life really is showing up.
Fourteen months since she put a bow on the Guts era with a festival-stealing Sunday-night headline set on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage, Rodrigo is performing before barely 1,000 people in a Brooklyn ballroom best known for hosting punk shows and a pierogi bar off stage right. The contraction in scale brings about a sense of whiplash. The 23-year-old’s progression from Disney Channel alumna to generational pop star is by all relevant metrics complete: her third LP, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, debuted at No 1 in June with the year’s biggest opening week by a female artist. In a few weeks, she will launch an 86-date world tour that includes a 10-night run at the nearby Barclays Center and concludes in May with 11 shows at London’s O2. Her well-documented gen X bona fides remain intact: only days earlier she had materialized beside Billy Corgan in the rain at Lollapalooza for a spectral rendition of the Smashing Pumpkins’ Thirty-Three, one of a scant few live appearances since the onset of the album cycle.
At Warsaw, there are no high-profile guests and nowhere to hide. Rodrigo emerges at 8.20pm in a pink floral minidress with puffed sleeves and a white Peter Pan collar, its prim 1960s silhouette undercut by black knee-high boots. She seems galvanized by the absence of distance, at one point plucking a phone from a fan’s hands and filming herself from the stage in a thoroughly contemporary bit of crowd work. The result sits somewhere between a tour preview and a basement show, polished but relaxed enough to let a little air in.
The lean, hour-long set makes no attempt to miniaturize an arena production while leaving some of her biggest crowd-pleasers on the table (Ballad of a Homeschooled Girl, Vampire, Traitor and Get Him Back! are notably absent tonight). Nine of its 15 songs came from You Seem Pretty Sad, including the opening four-song sequence of Drop Dead, U + Me = <3, Stupid Song and My Way. It is a confident decision to treat the new album as the evening’s premise rather than something to be endured between familiar hits, and it pays off. Bad Idea Right? is the first older song played this evening, but even Drivers License, slotted seventh, feels less like an inevitable centerpiece than another turn in a deliberately plotted sequence.
Rodrigo’s songs, mostly co-written with longtime collaborator Dan Nigro, repeatedly make the same sharp turns, moving from confessional balladry to pop-punk abrasion, saccharine sweetness to venom, the tear-stained bedroom to the slammed door. In a room this compressed, every swerve felt heightened. The spare performances of Drivers License and Making the Bed draw the audience inward before Maggots for Brains and All-American Bitch snap the tension; later, Less and Expectations clear space for the closing rush of Good 4 U and Deja Vu. Her still-excellent all-female and non-binary band – almost entirely holdovers from the Sour and Guts tours – play with enough kinetic force to make the old ballroom feel smaller, while the spartan staging and clipped transitions keep the emphasis squarely on the tightly composed material.
There is no encore, nor much need for one. After 60 minutes, the house lights come up and she is gone as quickly as she’d appeared, leaving behind an exhilarated crowd that had spent the morning earning the right to say they were there. Pop-up concerts are invariably exercises in manufactured scarcity and Thursday’s was no exception, but the performance itself never felt like a promotional stunt. If Glastonbury was a demonstration of Rodrigo’s reach, Warsaw laid bare the charisma and precision beneath the scale.
Reporting from The Guardian contributed to this story.
